Hello everyone and welcome to the overview of the last month in FAST. It’s been a busy time between TV of Tomorrow and the NAB Show, but here we are with the latest in FAST. (There will be a deeper dive into PAST this week, to continue the legacy of actually tracking the available channels that I started years ago at Variety - others may have speculated on what could be whereas the reality was that several services have been featuring premium streaming channels for years and Disney are entering a market that NBCUniversal, Paramount, AMC Networks and Roku—as a collator—currently play and Discovery used to.)
If you saw my FAST presentation and panel at the NAB Show and signed up to this because of it, thank you! To those of you who didn’t see me at other industry events but commented that you wish I was there moderating or whatnot, thank you too. Make sure you tell the organizers of upcoming conferences who you like to see on stage…
The number of FAST channels this month continues to slowly tick upward. I counted 1,963 across 19 tracked services (try as I might, I could not find Fire TV Channels on my Fire Stick this month, a common issue I’ve found—I can find News by Fire TV each month but the logo for Fire TV Channels appears and then vanishes like a mirage). I also discovered that I had been including 42 PAST channels on Peacock in the pror counts, which would make the March total FAST-only channels 1,919. Thus this month is an increase of 44 channels.
(Regarding Peacock and the renewed interest in PAST, please let me know if a total PAST/FAST count is something you’d be interested in seeing.)
Year-over-year, that’s an increase of 280 FAST channels or +17%.
What fed the increase this month? Below I’ll detail the breakout by genre, key highlights from what was added, and points of interest for certain services.
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